How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy That Actually Works
Written by Aron Anderson · Founder & Chief Growth OfficerWritten by Aron Anderson · Founder & Chief Growth Officer
A digital marketing strategy is a plan that connects your business goals to the online channels, content and budget that will achieve them. It answers four questions: who are we trying to reach, what do we want them to do, where will we reach them, and how will we measure it. Yet a remarkable share of businesses run their online marketing with no written strategy at all, which in practice means budget follows habit instead of results.
After thirteen years running campaigns at Rank Craft, here is the seven-step process we use to build an effective digital marketing strategy for clients, and the traps to avoid at each step.
"More followers" is not a goal. "Thirty qualified leads a month by December" is. Tie every marketing goal to a commercial outcome: revenue, leads, bookings or sales, with a number and a date attached. This single discipline changes every decision that follows, because each channel and campaign must now justify itself against the same yardstick. It is also what makes marketing ROI measurable later, which we cover in our guide to measuring marketing ROI.
Everything downstream depends on knowing who you serve. Build a simple buyer persona from real data rather than imagination: who your best customers actually are, what problem brings them to you, what they search for, which digital platforms they spend time on, and what objections stall them. Your customer enquiries, reviews and sales conversations contain most of this already. A strategy aimed at everyone converts no one.
Before spending on anything new, take stock of your current digital presence: website performance and conversion rate, search rankings, social media accounts, email list, and any paid ad history. Analytics will show you which digital channels already produce customers, which produce traffic that never converts, and which produce nothing. Most businesses discover their marketing efforts are concentrated in the channel they enjoy rather than the channel that pays.
The main types of digital marketing each do a different job, and an effective strategy assigns each a role rather than doing a little of everything:
A small business should pick two or three and do them properly. Spreading a limited marketing budget across six digital marketing channels guarantees mediocrity in all of them. The right mix depends on where your buyers actually decide: search-driven services lean SEO and PPC, visual products lean social and influencers, considered B2B purchases lean content and email.
Before any marketing campaign launches, write down the one thing a customer should remember about you and the proof that makes it credible. Every ad, page and post then carries the same story. Skipping this step is why so much digital marketing feels busy but builds nothing: fifty posts with fifty messages add up to no position at all in the customer's mind.
Fund the strategy like an investment portfolio: most of the budget into the one or two channels with proven returns, a slice into building the slow compounding assets like SEO and email, and a small experiment fund for new digital marketing tactics. Then set a publishing and campaign cadence you can sustain for twelve months. Consistency beats intensity in every channel we run, and an unsustainable plan quietly becomes no plan by March.
To make this concrete, here are three digital marketing strategy examples built with the process above, each pairing goals with the digital marketing tactics to match:
Notice what all three share: a small number of digital marketing channels, chosen deliberately, pointed at one goal, and measured. That is the whole trick. There are plenty of digital marketing plan templates online, but the thinking is the part no template can do for you.
Set up Google Analytics and conversion tracking on day one, review the numbers monthly, and be honest about what they say. Marketing analytics only creates value when it changes decisions: double down where the cost per lead is lowest, fix or cut what underperforms, and resist the urge to abandon channels that are working but boring. A successful digital marketing strategy is not the cleverest plan, it is the plan that gets measured and adjusted for long enough to compound.
If you would rather have a strategy built with you, with the channels run by one team under one plan, that is exactly what our internet marketing service does. The first conversation is free: tell us your goals here.
Strategy is the why and where: which audience, which goals, which channels, what message. Tactics are the individual actions inside it, like publishing a blog post or launching an ad campaign. Tactics without a strategy is the most common way businesses waste their marketing budget.
Start where your customers already look for you. For most local and service businesses that means search: a fast website, local SEO and Google Ads on buying keywords. Social media and email then build on the demand search captures.
Review performance monthly, adjust tactics quarterly, and rebuild the strategy annually. The goals rarely change mid-year, but the mix of channels and spend should follow the data wherever it points.
Aron founded Rank Craft in 2013 and leads growth and marketing strategy. He works with owners and marketing teams on the numbers that matter: leads, sales and return on marketing spend. More articles by Aron.